The majority of motorists in the UK have a clear understanding of road safety; otherwise they would have instantly failed their driving test and shouldn’t be on the roads today. We are all aware that wearing a seat belt is not only part of UK law, but it also saves lives in the unfortunate event that your vehicle does become involved in a road traffic accident. With this in mind, you can imagine the shock on a police officers face when he opens the door of a 10ft caravan and ten people pile out…
The Daily Mail reports of a father who drove 100 miles towing a small caravan that shocked fellow motorists enough to result in them calling the police. Motorists alerted the police when they spotted children peering through the curtains of Sameer Mirza’s 10ft caravan on the A55 in north Wales.
Police finally caught up with him on the A4244 and pulled him over at a petrol station near Deiniolen, North Wales. Police officers noticed that the tyres on the caravan looked weighed down, and asked to look inside. The last thing they were expecting was for 10 people to emerge from the tiny caravan. The caravan had been carrying seven children aged five to 14 and their mothers, including Mirza’s wife.
The car towing the caravan was carrying three passengers; Mirza, who was driving, and two other men, who were the husbands of the women travelling in the back of the caravan. Each of the men in the vehicle were wearing seatbelts. Mirza, 46, told police he was taking his family and friends for a picnic in Llanberis. Yesterday he appeared in court and was banned from driving for two years and fined £900.
After the hearing, Sergeant Ifan Jones said in all his years with North Wales Police Roads Policing Unit he had never come across anything like this. He said: “It was totally irresponsible and could have had disastrous consequences. The disastrous consequence of this caravan overturning or being involved in a collision are unimaginable-it was risking the lives of innocent people unnecessarily.”
Thankfully incidents like the one above are extremely rare, and most motorists would never even think of doing anything that would put innocent people at a risk of danger. Mirza failed to show a duty of care to his passengers, and none of them should have been travelling without a seatbelt – never mind allowing ten of them to travel in a caravan.
